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MiddleMan |
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Despite widespread interest and technical progress, significant barriers exist for video playback over the Internet. These obstacles include network unreliability and server bottlenecks. Although various playback systems have been proposed, none address all the issues satisfactorily. We investigate an alternate approach, MiddleMan, consisting of a collection of cooperating caching proxies running in a local area network (LAN). Such a configuration offers several advantages. By caching videos relatively close to the clients, MiddleMan reduces overall startup delays and the possibility of adverse Internet conditions disrupting video playback. Additionally, MiddleMan dramatically reduces server load by intercepting a large number of server accesses and can be easily extended to provide other services. MiddleMan differs from existing proxy research in that it concentrates exclusively on video. Other approaches are optimized for dealing with HTML documents and images. Both media types possess properties different from video and, hence, are unlikely to cache video data effectively. |
Paper to come soon
This research is supported by DARPA (contract N00014-95-1-0799), Intel, Xerox, Microsoft, and Kodak
